Remembering Maurice Sendak, Children’s Literary Pioneer and Champion

Maurice Sendak, beloved illustrator and children’s book author, died this morning of complications from a stroke. He was 83. Sendak was likely part of your childhood, having written Where the Wild Things Are, Chicken Soup with Rice, and In the Night Kitchen, proving that children’s stories needn’t—and shouldn’t—be sugar-coated and neatly packaged. From his New York Times obituary:

A largely self-taught illustrator, Mr. Sendak was at his finest a shtetl Blake, portraying a luminous world, at once lovely and dreadful, suspended between wakefulness and dreaming. In so doing, he was able to convey both the propulsive abandon and the pervasive melancholy of children’s interior lives.

Sendak’s life and work are pretty inseparable from his Jewishness, and particularly his dark, cynical inflection of it. “The Holocaust,” he once said, “has run like a river of blood through all my books” (he was born in Brooklyn, but many relatives died in the Shoah).